BandA wrote:So you see the Green Line branching at Newton Highlands, running to Needham Junction then via the current Needham line to Forest Hills, where commuters would have to transfer?
Not quite. Orange Line would replace the mainline stops out to West Roxbury. Green Line would go on the abandoned ROW from Newton Highlands to Needham Heights then absorb everything to Junction. Junction to West Rox would probably be mothballed, since Highland Ave. is the far busier and less environmentally sensitive Route 128 node than Great Plain Ave. by the park/golf course/wetlands. That is more or less what's been proposed ever since 1945 and every re-study afterwards:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ns_map.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. With present-day exception that the Dedham Ctr. Orange ROW is obliterated and no longer available.
For variety of reasons I won't get into on a BCLR freight thread it was preferable to all parties to have higher-frequencies on separate flanks following the traditional bus routes vs. preserving the desolate stretch of existing commuter rail track through Cutler Park and Hersey no-man's land. Basically, given the natural all-day orientations of Needham-Newton and Roslindale-West Roxbury the convenience of the 9-5'er direct from Needham Jct. to Downtown isn't anywhere as near-and-dear to these areas historically as you would assume just looking at a map. And all of this is predicated on pulling the Central Subway out of its massive deferred maint and obsolescence hole first. It used to be possible to take a trip on the D that didn't die a horrible death between the Fenway and Gov't Ctr., and it used to be standard practice to run rush-hour expresses on various Green branches. So you can't really predicate this branch's future ops reliability and rush-hour travel time vs. today's commuter rail and today's clownshoes Green Line conditions...but rather the aspirational target of non-optional fixes they must do for EVERY Green Line rider. In short, they've pretty confidently established that Highlands-Junction and Forest Hills-W. Rox as separate flanks off a sensible subway state-of-repair is hands-down preferable. And town of Needham has long been A-OK with that.
I would assume when push-comes-to-shove and the Needham Line's days as a viable NEC branch are over (think 2040 SuperDuper HSR plan making a 2030's rapid transit conversion a prerequisite), they would probably do it in stages:
-- Spur Green from Newton Highlands to a Needham Heights turnback. Either a temporary station a few feet away from the normally-operating commuter rail station, or truncating commuter rail to Needham Ctr. and the layover yard so it's only displaced at Heights. No changes to CR ops when it opens.
-- Digest the cost, and fund Phase II Heights-Junction separately. You can, of course, lay utility lines, clear ROW for the second track, and erect trolley poles while commuter rail is still operating on a normal schedule.
-- Truncate commuter rail to Junction, use the surviving Millis tail tracks that'll extend a distance past the west wye as idling spot (basically, the way Stoughton's tail tracks work). Up 59 frequencies between Heights and Junction during the track outage. Blitz the conversion of the tracks from Heights to Junction (this is thankfully not too hard when the low platforms are trolley height). The trolley loop and mini-yard cannibalize the wye, but the station would be where the DPW lot is in the middle of the wye and not the current depot building on the Millis mainline.
-- Begin similar ROW grading, bridge deck, and utility work FH-W. Rox while commuter rail is still running. Can even do the new station platforms commuter rail-usable Malden/Oak Grove style, since the only difference between an Orange platform and a commuter rail full-high is that Orange has an extra platform-edge jut bolted on for the narrower car with.
-- Inaugurate light rail service from Heights to Junction, suspend FH-Junction commuter rail for good. 59 bus extends to Great Plain Ave. for benefit of the (light) Hersey patronage that get orphaned for the needs of the many. Start blitzing Orange construction.
-- Inaugurate OL service. Assume that the new W. Rox station is behind the Shaw's supermarket a little west of the current platforms is the new stop, and that the layover yard is by the Baker St. electrical substation a block west. This does permit a +1 extension west to 128 and/or Junction if they see a future need, but it would never be something they'd build out the gate. Just keep in mind that they can still do it if they want to.
-- Interim paved rail-trail Junction-W. Rox as extension of the Millis trail. That would be a really well-patronized rec route the way it links Hersey grade-separated to Junction, bridges the 128 divide, opens up Cutler Park, and dumps straight into the city in easy reach of some of the Olmstead parks along the parkways. Again...if it's a must-have you can always extend Orange in the future. There's no shortage of space in Cutler Park to move the trail off to the side of the ROW embankment next to the power lines.
Needham Industrial Park and Newton Industrial Park seemed to suffer more from high real estate values, traffic, retail and office conversion than from poor railroading. Did BCLR have high prices & poor service? There were lots of customers up till the 1980's, but they were clearly dying even then.
By 1982 BCLR had amassed all of the following Conrail dispersals:
-- Newton-Millis
-- Framingham & Lowell from end of Conrail territory at South Sudbury to roughly the Acton/Chelmsford town line. With B&M/Guilford interchange on the Fitchburg Line in West Acton
-- Greenbush Line from Conrail's Braintree Yard to the old military spur in Cohasset
-- Plymouth Line (all, out of Braintree interchange)
-- Hanover Branch forking off Plymouth Line in Abington
-- Cape Cod: Middleboro-Hyannis, Falmouth Branch to downtown Falmouth, old mainline to South Dennis
-- Dean St. Industrial Track, Taunton
-- Wattupa Branch
Greenbush went kaput in '84. F&L was kaput before '92. South Dennis was cut back to Yarmouth transfer station, Falmouth cut back to Otis AFB, Wattupa slightly cut back from about the 195/24 interchange to the 195/88 interchange all around '90 give or take. Plymouth was mostly OOS by the time the T began commuter rail construction in '95. Hanover was kaput by decade's end. Newton was kaput by '02. They lost the MassDOT contract renewal on the Cape and Dean St. lines in embarrassing fashion in '07 to an outfit (Mass Coastal) that
didn't even exist as a freight carrier at bid time. And the GAF plant in Millis closed in ('09?).
25 years...all gone. All of it except 2 anchor customers--a brewery and a scrap yard--and 1 or 2 marginal customers on Wattupa. And now this Tresca thing for however long it lasts.
Some of it was because these pickups were already on their last legs when Conrail dumped them and there was nothing any shortline could've done to stop 'em from going abandoned. Certainly the closure of the military installation in Cohasset was beyond their control. As was a lot of the on-Cape atrophy. But most of the losses were because BCLR was far and away New England's worst-run shortline. That's way too impressively large a squander in way too short a time to simply be the result changing industrial demographics in that many towns on that many lines. Poor customer service, missed deliveries because they barely had any working power, not exactly enamoring themselves to their Class I interchange partners who got sick of dealing with scatterbrained amateurs, too high a reliance on part-time staffing leaving them crew-short too much of the time. Plymouth/Hanover and Newton were definitely inexcusable squanders given what they started with. The Wattupa atrophying to current levels was inexcusable; Mass Coastal could probably get 2 or 3 more Dartmouth customers easy if it took over. Real estate may have jumped, but there's a reason why all those industrial park buildings with freight sidings went 100% office conversion in such a short period of time: there was no value in having a rail connection when the rail connection was so unreliable.
They're owned by a holding company in Florida that also owns the far larger/healthier Seminole RR. So I doubt there's anything relative Wattupa stability and this Tresca thing are going to do to keep their owners from throwing in the towel and liquidating sooner or later. They're too tiny and remote a business unit to retain when Seminole has such higher upside. I seriously doubt they'll be around in 5 years. The GAF plant is so rundown it's basically unusable, so whoever buys the property is probably just going to knock it down and build commercial there. The 70,000 sq. ft. GAF warehouse at the end of the line is a decent prospect if that ever gets rented out to an interested rail tenant. But how are they going to attract a new rail tenant when they don't even have a sales staff? And only 3 operating locomotives spread across 2 lines 30 miles apart. There's no way up with their present scale.
Mass Coastal will happily buy them out on the Wattupa when the home office in Florida decides to shut down the BCLR unit. And now that MassDOT owns the Framingham Secondary if Tresca needs business assistance to get optimal local deliveries instead of trucking from Walpole or Framingham the state now has the wherewithal to install a team track at Medfield Jct. near one of the dirt patches accessible off W. Mill St. or Ice House Rd. and square things with CSX to keep deliveries going if the Environmental Dr. loading area is no longer an option. There's no service that BCLR provides that can't be 100% absorbed by another willing partner, so we're basically just waiting until the absentee owners see liquidation and consolidation as the bigger cost-benefit than continuing to operate.
It really is amazing how many route miles died under their watch entirely in the post-Staggers Act era. They were overachievers at anti-overachieving.